Analytical Study on Bug Triaging Practices

Software bugs are inevitable and fixing these bugs is a difficult and time consuming task. Bug report assignment is the activity of designating a developer who makes source code changes in order to fix the bug. Many bug assignment techniques have been proposed in the existing studies. These studies use different datasets, varied input and evaluation parameters to validate their work. This diversification in bug triaging results in perplexity among researchers. Hence, this paper organizes the work performed in bug triaging in a structured manner. This paper aims to present current state of the art to provide a structured consolidation of bug triaging approaches. The paper has identified six research questions under five dimensions to address the various aspects of bug triaging. 60 articles from 36 venues have been reviewed and categorized in order to organize and substructure existing work in the field of bug report assignment. This study will help researchers to wisely decide the weapons for bug triaging. Also, it will act as a ready reference for the bug triaging practitioners.